As we approach the end of the twentieth century, religion has once again become a force to be reckoned with. We are witnessing a widespread revival which would have seemed inconceivable to many people during the 1950s and sixties when secularists tended to assume that religion was a primitive superstition outgrown by civilised, rational man. Some confidently predicted its imminent demise. At best religion was a marginal and private activity, which could no longer influence world events. Now we realise that this was a false prophecy. In the Soviet Union, after decades of official atheism, men and women are demanding the right to practise their faith. In the West, people who have little interest in conventional doctrine and institutional churches have shown a new awareness of spirituality and the inner life. Most dramatically, perhaps, a radical religiosity, which we usually call 'fundamentalism', has erupted in most of the major religions. It is an intensely political form of faith and some see it as a grave danger to world and civic peace. Governments ignore it at their peril. Yet again, as so often in the past, an age of scepticism has been followed by a period of intense religious fervour: religion seems to be an important human need which cannot easily be discarded or pushed to the sidelines, no matter how rational or sophisticated our society. Some will welcome this new age of faith, others will deplore it, but none of us can dismiss religion as irrelevant to the chief concerns of our century. The religious instinct is extremely powerful and can be used for good and ill. We must, therefore, understand it and examine its manifestations carefully, not only in our own society but also in other cultures.

Our dramatically shrunken world has revealed our inescapable connection with one another. We can no longer think of ourselves as separate from people in distant parts of the globe and leave them to their own fate. We have a responsibility to each other and face common dangers. It is also possible for us to acquire an appreciation of other civilisations that was unimaginable before our own day. For the first time, people all over the world are beginning to find inspiration in more than one religion and many have adopted the faith of another culture. Thus Buddhism is enjoying a great flowering in the West, where Christianity had once As we approach the end of the twentieth century, religion has once again reigned supreme. But even when people have remained true to the faith of their fathers, they have sometimes been influenced by other traditions. Sir Sarvepalli Rudhakrishnan (1888-1975), the great Hindu philosopher and statesman, for example, was educated at the Christian College of Madras and strongly affected the religious thought of people of both East and West. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965), who wrote his doctoral thesis on the'two medieval Christian mystics Nicholas of Cusa and Meister Eckhart, has been read enthusiastically by Christians and has had a profound influence on their ideas and spirituality. Jews tend to be less interested in Buber than are Christians, but they do read the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and the modernist thinker Harvey Cox. The barriers of geographical distance, hostility and fear, which once kept the religions in separate watertight compartments, are beginning to fall.

Although much of the old prejudice remains, this is a hopeful development. It is particularly heartening, after centuries of virulent Christian anti-Semitism, to see Jewish and Christian scholars attempting to reach a new understanding. There is an incipient perception of the deep unity of mankind's religious experience and a realisation that traditions which 'we' once despised can speak to our own condition and revitalise our spirituality .The implication of this could be profound: we will never be able to see either our own or other peoples' religions and cultures in quite the same way again. The possible result of this has been compared to the revolution that science has effected in the outlook of men and women throughout the world. Many people will find this development extremely threatening and they will erect new barricades against the 'Other', but some are already beginning to glimpse broader horizons and find that they are moved by religious ideals that their ancestors would have dismissed with contempt.

But one major religion seems to be outside this circle of goodwill and, in the West at least, to have retained its negative image. People who are beginning to find inspiration in Zen or Taoism are usually not nearly so eager to look kindly upon Islam, even though it is the third religion of Abraham and more in tune with our own Judaeo-Christian tradition. In the West we have a long history of hostility towards Islam that seems as entrenched as our anti-Semitism, which in recent years has seen a disturbing revival in Europe. At least, however, many people have developed a healthy fear of this ancient prejudice since the Nazi Holocaust. But the old hatred of lslam  continues to flourish on both sides of the Atlantic and people have few scruples about attacking this religion, even if they know little about it.

The hostility is understandable, because until the rise of the Soviet Union in our own century, no polity or ideology posed such a continuous "challenge to the West as Islam. When the Muslim empire was established in the seventh century CE, Europe was a backward region. Islam had quickly overrun much of the Christian world of the Middle East as well as the great Church of North Africa, which had been of crucial importance to the Church of Rome. This brilliant success was threatening: had God deserted the Christians and bestowed his favour on the infidel? Even when Europe recovered from the Dark Ages and established its own great civilisation, the old fear of the ever-expanding Muslim empire remained. 

This inaccurate image of Islam became one of the received ideas of Europe and it continues to affect our perceptions of the Muslim world. The problem has been compounded by the fact that, for the first time in Islamic history, Muslims have begun to cultivate a passionate hatred of the West. In part this is due to European and American behaviour in the Islamic world. It is a mistake to imagine that Islam is an inherently violent or fanatical faith, as is sometimes suggested. Islam is a universal religion and there is nothing aggressively oriental or anti-Western about it.

Indeed, when Muslims first encountered the colonial West during the eighteenth century many were impressed by its modern civilisation and tried to emulate it. But in recent years this initial enthusiasm has given way to bitter resentment. We should also remember that 'fundamentalism' has surfaced in most religions and seems to be a world-wide response to the peculiar strain of late-twentieth-century life. Radical Hindus have taken to the streets to defend the caste system and to oppose the Muslims of India; Jewish fundamentalists have made illegal settlements on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and have vowed to drive all Arabs from their Holy Land; Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and the new Christian Right, which saw the Soviet Union as the evil empire, achieved astonishing power in the United States during the 1980s. It is wrong, therefore, to assume that Muslim extremists are typical of their faith. It would be just as mistaken to see the late Ayatollah Khomeini as the incarnation of lslam as to dismiss the rich and complex tradition of Judaism because of the immoral policies of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. If  'fundamentalism' seems particularly rife in the Muslim world, this is because of the population explosion. To give just one telling example: there were only 9 million Iranians before the Second World War; today there are 57 million and their average age is seventeen. Radical Islam, with its extreme and black-and-white solutions, is a young person's faith.

Most Westerners do not know enough about traditional Islam to assess this new strain and put it in a proper perspective. When Shiites in the Lebanon take hostages in the name of 'Islam',  people in Europe and America naturally feel repelled by the religion itself, without realising that this behaviour contravenes important legislation in the Qu'ran about the taking and treatment of captives. Regrettably, the media and the popular press do not always give us the help we need. Far more coverage, for example, was given to the Muslims who vociferously supported Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against the British author Salman Rushdie than to the majority who opposed it. The religious authorities of Saudi Arabia and the sheikhs of the prestigious mosque of al-Azhar in Cairo both condemned thefatwa as illegal and un-Islamic: Muslim law does not permit a man to be sentenced to death without trial and has no jurisdiction outside the Islamic world. At the Islamic Conference of March 1989, forty-four out of the forty-five member states unanimously rejected the Ayatollah's ruling. But this received only cursory attention in the British press and left many people with the misleading impression that the entire Muslim world was clamouring for Rushdie's blood. Sometimes the media seems to stir up our traditional prejudices, as was particularly apparent during the OPEC oil crisis of 1973. The imagery used in cartoons,  advertisements and popul1\r articles was rooted in old Western fears of a Muslim conspiracy to take over the world.

Many "eople feel that Muslim society justifies our stereotypical view of it: life seems cheap; governments are sometimes corrupt or tyrannical; women are oppressed. It is not uncommon for people to blame this state of affairs on 'Islam'. But scholars warn us not to over-emphasise the role of any religion on a given society and Marshall G. S. Hodgson, the distinguished historian of Islam, points out that the aspects of the Muslim world condemned in the West are characteristic of most pre-modern societies: life would not have been very different here three hundred years ago. But sometimes there seems to be a definite desire to blame the faith itself for every disorder in the Muslim world. Thus feminists frequently condemn 'Islam' for the custom of female  circumcision. This despite the fact that it is really an African practice, is never mentioned in the Qu'ran, is not prescribed by three of the four main schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and was absorbed into the fourth school in North Africa where it was a fact of life. It is as impossible to generalise about Islam as about Christianity; there is a wide range of ideas and ideals in both.

A clear example of stereotyping is the common assumption that the Islam practised in Saudi Arabia is the most authentic form of the faith. Seemingly more archaic, it is supposed to resemble that practised by the first community of Muslims. Because the West has long considered the regime in Saudi Arabia obnoxious, it tends to write off 'Islam' too. But Wahhabism is only an Islamic sect. It developed in the eighteenth century and was similar to the Christian Puritan sect that flourished during the seventeenth century in England, the Netherlands and Massachusetts.

The Puritans and the Wahhabis both claimed to be returning to the original faith, but both were really an entirely new development and a response to the unique conditions of the time. Both Wahhabism and Puritanism exerted an important influence in the Muslim and Christian worlds respectively, but it is a mistake to view either sect as normative in their religion. Reform movements in any faith attempt to return to the original spirit of the founder, but it is never possible to reproduce former conditions entirely.

I am not claiming that Islam is entirely faultless. All religions are human institutions and frequently make serious mistakes. All have sometimes expressed their faith in inadequate and even in abhorrent ways. But they have also been creative, enabling millions of men and women to find faith in the ultimate meaning and value of life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. To put 'Islam' into an unholy category of its own or to assume that its influence has been wholly or even predominantly negative is both inaccurate and unjust. It is a betrayal of the tolerance and  compassion that are supposed to characterise Western society .In fact Islam shares many of the ideals and visions that have inspired both Judaism and Christianity.

Consequently it has helped people to cultivate values that it shares with our own culture. The Judaeo-Christian tradition does not have the monopoly on either monotheism or concern for justice, decency, compassion and respect for humanity.

Indeed, the Muslim interpretation of the monotheistic faith has its own special genius and has important things to teach us. Ever since Islam came to my attention, I have been increasingly aware of this. Until a few years ago, I was almost entirely ignorant about the religion. The first inkling I had that it was a tradition that could speak to me came during a holiday in Samarkand. There I found the Islamic architecture to express a spirituality that resonated with my own  Catholic past. In 1984 I had to make a television programme about Sufism, the mysticism of Islam, and was particularly impressed by the Sufi appreciation of other religions -a quality that I had certainly not encountered in Christianity! This challenged everything that I had taken for granted about 'Islam' and I wanted to learn more. Finally, during a study of the Crusades and the current conflict in the Middle East, I was led to the life of Muhammad and to the Qu'ran, the scripture that he 'brought to the Arabs. I am no longer a believing or practising Christian nor do I belong to any other official religion. But at the same time as I have been revising my ideas about

Islam, I have also been reconsidering the religious experience itself. In all the great religions, seers and prophets have conceived strikingly similar visions of a transcendent and ultimate reality. However we choose to interpret it, this human experience has been a fact of life. Indeed, Buddhists deny that there is anything supernatural about it: it is a state of mind that is natural to humanity. The monotheistic faiths, however, call this transcendence 'God'. I believe that  Muhammad had such an experience and made a distinctive and valuable contribution to the spiritual experience of humanity .If we are to do justice to our Muslim neighbours, we must appreciate this essential fact and that is why I have written this book.

There are surprisingly few accessible biographies of Muhammad for the general reader. I have been particularly indebted to the two volumes by W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca and Muhammad at Medina,  but these are for students and presuppose a basic knowledge of Muhammad's life that not everybody has. Martin Lings' Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources gives a wealth of fascinating information from Muhammad's biographers of the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries. But Lings is writing for the converted. An outsider will have many questions to ask of a basic, even of an argumentative nature which Lings does not address. Perhaps the most attractive of the biographies currently in print is Maxime Rodinson's Mohammad. Rodinson wears his considerable erudition lightly and I have learned a great deal from his book, but he writes as a sceptic and a secularist. Concentrating as he does on the political and military aspects of the Prophet's life, he does not really help us to understand Muhammad's spiritual vision.

My own approach has been rather different. We know more about Muhammad than about the founder of any other major faith so that a study of his life can give us an important insight into the nature of the religious experience. All religions represent a dialogue between an absolute, ineffable reality and mundane events. In Muhammad's prophetic career we can examine this process more closely than is usually possible. We shall see that Muhammad's spiritual experience bears an arresting similarity to that of the prophets of Israel, St Teresa of Avila and Dame Julian of Norwich. I have also used various incidents in the Prophet's life to illustrate the particular emphases of the Muslim tradition. All major religions cover many of the same themes but each has its own particular insight. Thus we shall have to consider why Muslims regard politics as a religious duty .Muhammad achieved an extraordinary political success and  Christians tend to see such worldly triumph as of questionable godliness; but is a Christ-like failure the only way to God?

I also look at the Prophet from the point of view of a person with particular preconceptions about Islam. Thus, when we see Muhammad waging war against the city of Mecca, we shall have to ask whether he really did found a religion of the sword? How could a man of God be prepared to fight and kill? When we consider Muhammad's relationship with his wives and daughters, we must ask whether he really was a chauvinist, who founded a misogynistic religion.

The Gulf War of 1991 showed that, whether we like it or not, we are deeply connected with the Muslim world. Despite temporary alliances, it is clear that the West has largely lost the confidence of people in the Islamic world. A breakdown in communications is never the fault of one party and if the West is to regain the sympathy and respect that it once enjoyed in the Muslim world it must examine its own role in the Middle East and consider its own  difficulties vis-a-vis Islam. That is why the first chapter of this book traces the history of Western hatred for the Prophet of Islam. But the picture is not entirely black. From the earliest days, some Europeans were able to achieve a more balanced view. They were always in a minority and they had their failings but this handful of people tried to correct the errors of their contemporaries and rise above received opinion. It is surely this more tolerant, compassionate and courageous tradition that we should seek to encourage now.